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Apple has reportedly made a long-term internal project to unify the infrastructure that powers cloud offerings such as Siri and Apple Maps. This is a sign that the company has begun to view services as a strategic lynchpin moving forward. According to Amir Efrati of The Information, each of Apple’s cloud services will eventually run atop a core platform that is based on the one designed by the Siri team. This effort, which will likely take several years to pay off, will be headed by engineering manager Patrick Gates, who came to Apple with the acquisition of NeXT in 1997.

As of right now, services such as iCloud and Apple Music run mostly on discrete, purpose-built platforms that are largely not compatible with one another. This is an artifact of Apple’s longstanding policy of building silos around individual groups and teams but that model hasn’t worked out so well in the cloud era. Efrati noted that in particular it causes problems with cross-service integrations and made adding features to complex offerings like iCloud difficult.

The news of Apple migrating to a single common platform is the latest sign that Apple has begun to shift away from that pattern under the leadership of Tim Cook along with new engineering heads Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio. Cook first nodded in the direction when he gave Federighi control of iOS, promoting him to SVP of Software Engineering in the process, during Scott Forstall’s departure. Cook then expanded Jony Ive’s role and eventually ended up appointing him chief design officer with broad purview over everything from font selection to the Apple Store architecture. The consolidation here continued with the hiring of Angela Ahrendts to run retail operations. Ahrendts gained control of both online and brick-and-mortar retail sales, which had previously operated as independent groups with different reports.

Looks like Apple is making several changes to their infrastructure, all of which are for the better, under Cook’s leadership.